The Reader

Above the Line

« Back to Above the Line

Producer

Donna Gigliotti

Bio

Donna Gigliotti has been awarded the motion picture industry’s highest honors for her achievements as a film producer and studio production executive both internationally and in the United States. She is one of only five women producers ever to win a Best Picture Academy Award in seventy-nine years of Oscar history. The recognition Gigliotti has received for her work in film from outside the United States is longstanding, dating as far back as 1985 when Gigliotti became the youngest woman knighted to the rank of Chevalier des Arts et Letters by the French Republic. In 1998 her peers in the film industry voted for her to receive the Academy Award for producing SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. The film was awarded six additional Oscars, including Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Original Screenplay (Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman). The Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded her the 1999 Golden Globe/Best Picture/Comedy and the members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts bestowed on her the 2000 British Academy Award (BAFTA) for having produced the film. During Gigliotti’s career she has worked as both a studio executive and a film producer. Following SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, Barry Diller hired Gigliotti as President of Production at USA Films, the feature film division of Diller’s USA Entertainment Group. During her tenure at USA, she was responsible for and oversaw the production of Robert Altman’s GOSFORD PARK, winner of Best Original Screenplay Academy Award in 2002, and Steven Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC, winner of Best Director, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards in 2001. Gigliotti’s producing credits include TWO LOVERS, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, which premiered in the 2008 competition section of the Cannes Film Festival and will be released in February 2009. THE GOOD NIGHT, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Penélope Cruz, Danny DeVito and Simon Pegg, had its world premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Additional productions include VANITY FAIR, directed by Mira Nair and starring Reese Witherspoon. Gigliotti started her career in the motion picture industry as assistant to Martin Scorsese on his film RAGING BULL. She credits Scorsese with teaching her everything she knows about the creative aspects of great story telling. Gigliotti’s studio career continued at United Artists as the director of acquisitions for their specialty division, UA Classics. There she identified and acquired groundbreaking films that are now considered classics by critics and audiences alike. Among them are Francois Truffaut’s THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR, Jean Jacques Beniex’s DIVA and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s VERONICA VOSS. Gigliotti also served as Executive Vice President at Miramax Films where her films included Doug McGrath’s EMMA, Michael Hoffman’s RESTORATION and Franco Zefferelli’s JANE EYRE. Prior to Miramax, Gigliotti founded Orion Classics in 1982 for Arthur Krim, former Chairman of United Artists and then Chairman of Orion Pictures Corporation. Orion Classics, a division of Orion Pictures, was the model for later specialized film distribution companies such as Fox Searchlight, Sony’s Screen Gems and Warner Independent. Orion Classics proved to be the pre-eminent distributor of specialized films in the United States during the 1980’s. Gigliotti was responsible for acquiring films by well known world class filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa’s RAN and Louis Malle’s AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS. She was also instrumental in launching young emerging directors and their films, including Pedro Almodovar’s WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, Steven Frears’ MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, John Sayles’s LIANNA, Claude Berri’s JEAN DE FLORETTE and Gabriel Axel’s Oscar winning BABETTE’S FEAST. Currently, Gigliotti has returned to independent production through her company, Tempesta Films. She recently completed production on SHANGHAI, starring John Cusack, Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College.

Producer- Job Description

The chief of a movie production in all matters save the creative efforts of the director. A producer is responsible for raising funding, hiring key personnel, and arranging for distributors.